Traffic control relates to the control of traffic participants in particular to control vehicles in a traffic infrastructure of a predetermined area. Traffic control can involve directing vehicular or pedestrian traffic around a construction zone, accident or other road disruption, thus insuring the safety of emergency response teams, construction workers and public traffic participants. Further, traffic control is performed to avoid traffic congestion or traffic jams.
Vehicles nowadays are equipped with a navigation system which supports the driver to avoid traffic jams. Navigation systems can suggest an alternative route based on a navigation map material and traffic announcements. A navigation system can use a GPS navigation device acquiring position data to locate the vehicle on a road stored in the unit map database. With the road database the navigation system can give directions to other locations along roads. However, conventional navigation systems have the disadvantage that they may rely on not updated or unreliable map data.
Furthermore, vehicles are also equipped with driver assistance systems which support a driver of the vehicle to perform driving maneuvers such as parking maneuvers. These assistance systems can comprise vehicle cameras which are able to capture camera images of the vehicle's surrounding. The camera images of the vehicle's surrounding can be processed to extract traffic information. For example, a speed limit indicated by a traffic sign can be extracted from the captured camera image and used for driver assistance. However, this requires the availability of at least one vehicle camera in the vehicle and further requires sufficient computation resources for processing the camera images for traffic information extraction. A further disadvantage is that the captured camera images depend strongly on the environment. For example in a heavy fog environment it will not be possible to extract speed limit information indicated on a traffic sign.
Accordingly there is a need for an efficient and reliable traffic control system which overcomes the above-mentioned disadvantages.